Ylan Kunstler

3 years of pricing lessons at Equals condensed into one blog post. Since starting the company, we've tinkered a lot with pricing and packaging. It's one of the single most impactful levers early stage companies can pull. I think folks *don't* experiment with pricing enough, or take big enough bets when they do. We've tried free. We've tried completely sales led. We've tried not listing pricing on the site. Matt Hodges details all the plans we've had, why, and what we've learned in our latest installment on Wrap Text. https://lnkd.in/ecckEDba

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Speed of learning is one of the most important founder attributes — and sometimes that means getting support to move faster. I’ve seen folks like Carol do just this and unblock founders and their early growth. It’s powerful to ask for help!

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Learn how to fine-tune your product to meet market demands with strategic customer conversations and data-driven feedback mechanisms 👇 ➡ 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗲: Brian Long, CEO & Co-Founder at Attentive 🔌 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄𝗲𝗿: Nick Moran, General Partner at New Stack Ventures and Nate Pierotti, Principal at New Stack Ventures ✏ “The Playbook to Finding Product-Market Fit, When Founders Should Begin to Scale, and Lessons from Building Attentive” ⭐ 𝗦𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗯𝘆 𝘁𝗮𝗹𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝗮 𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗼𝘂𝘀 𝗮𝗺𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗼���� 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀: 💬 "I think that what we got right were two things. One, I think that we talked to a tremendous amount of customers, before we started building things. So we learned to hear their problems, hear their issues, and then start building and assaulting those, you know, rather than kind of just jumping right into build-build-build, so that saved us a lot of time." ⭐ 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗻𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝘀𝗰𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗰𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗿𝘀, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗾𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗳𝗲𝗲𝗱𝗯𝗮𝗰𝗸, 𝘁𝗼 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝘁𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗯𝗶𝗮𝘀: 💬 "I think you're also looking at things like NPS, you know… because if that number starts dropping, it's often because you're no longer solving the problem." ⭐ 𝗧𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗮 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴-𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗮 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗯𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗴𝗼𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆: 💬 "I think that we've taken an even longer term focus. We know what can be big. And we know it's dangerous to start getting an ego to think you can do things because it's always very hard. You've always got to think towards taking a longer term view, having a thesis around that view, and then understand how the pieces can come together for success." ───── 👉 Follow me, Alexander Small, for tactics and strategies for building startups from industry-leading Founders, Operators and Investors

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🚀 "We built Unloop Connect to support the founders who are really feeling the pinch," Michael Pignatelli reveals. As I dove deep into the everyday challenges that emerging brands face on Amazon with Michael Pignatelli, CPA, MAcc, Co-Founder of Unloop Accounting, it was clear that the path to simplifying e-commerce finance is more vital than ever. Michael's insights into accounting automation and the strategic use of Unloop Connect are game-changers for any brand looking to navigate the complexities of Amazon's marketplace efficiently. Michael's dedication to making high-quality accounting accessible reflects our mission at ExpertCPG Commerce—to empower brands with the tools and strategies they need to thrive on Amazon without getting bogged down by the details. How has automating mundane tasks changed the way you manage your business? What results have you seen from integrating new technologies? 🎧📺 Listen or Watch the Full Episode here: https://ecpg.us/3Qhk2pN #CPG #ecommerce #Amazon #podcast #UnloopAccounting #businessgrowth #financialmanagement

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Ibotta, Inc., a platform that helps CPG brands deliver promotions to millions of consumers went public today, and you probably didn't hear about it. My guess as to why? It hasn't raised money from any big-name VC firms with big marketing teams. Ibotta was started 12 years ago after Bryan Leach saw someone take a photo of a receipt for an expense report and realized there were tons of interesting data contained in that picture that was going to waste. Fast forward 13 years and Ibotta is a profitable, fast-growing business helping over 2,400 of the most notable brands like Kraft Heinz, General Mills, and Unilever. They touch over 91% of US households... Ibotta offers shoppers cash-back on in-store purchases funded by its advertisers, while also collecting all sorts of valuable data like cart makeup and much much more. They've paid out over $1.8B to consumers over the course of the company Quick 2023 Numbers: Revenue: $320M (+52%) Gross Margin: 86% (best in class despite not being traditional "SaaS") Net Income Margin: 12% (a quick turn around from a $50m loss in 2022) Adjusted EBIDTA Margin: 26% In 2022, they inked a MASSIVE partnership with Walmart that made up for a huge amount of 2023 growth via 3rd Party revenue. As a part of that deal, Walmart also owns a significant amount of the company There are some fun case studies in the S1 showing off some hot up-and-coming brands as well including poppi and Chomps. When you dig deeper, one of the more concerning parts of the business is the revenue concentration inside of Walmart, but with their significant ownership %, it's unlikely they go anywhere. Seed investors paid $0.74.share and it's going public at $88/share so that's a pretty good day at the office. Excited to see how this trades!

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“The deal team tends to forget about the ambers and greens, even though they often outweigh the reds”🚦 That was the feedback shared with me by a seasoned CEO who is now running his third PE-backed company. He was making the point that traffic light (or “RAG”) ratings for diligence findings are usually effective for helping to focus the mind of the deal team on the single-most impactful diligence findings (usually those flagged as red risks). And this is often what is required to get deals across the line⏩ ⚡However, when it comes to operating / integrating the newly acquired asset post-closing, in the aggregate, it is often the lower-order issues identified in due diligence that require the most attention and are those that are most neglected by the deal teams. 🔰 With a degree of compassion, he acknowledged that “you can’t really blame the deal teams. Investment committees and boards rarely have any interest in discussing ambers and greens”. 📄 It is for this reason that some of the more sophisticated corporates and financial sponsors are now broadening their internal reporting and dashboards. 🖼 The goal being to expand the viewing pane through which diligence issues are considered holistically and integrating feedback from the management teams / PMI advisors earlier in the diligence process. One Head of Corporate Development told me that “we used to include a list of the top ten (or so) risks and their mitigants in our board submissions. Now we share a dashboard of all of the findings and we make sure we take into account the feedback of our ops team before we do so”. No doubt to the relief of management teams and PMI advisors, this approach seems to be increasingly common. Although, by way of contrast / light relief, I was also recently talking to the Global Head of Corporate of a large advisory firm about their innovations in the space of diligence. One example he gave – with surprising enthusiasm - was the recent introduction of a traffic light system into their DD reports… Fortunately for them (and their clients) this was not the only (so-called) innovation… #manda #dd #duediligence #pmi #ragreports #dontforgettheambersandgreens

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Parker just posted Rippling's new fundraising memo. It's the manifesto for compound startups and one of our initial inspirations for building Atlas. Here's a nugget that I really liked that summarizes how we feel about the competitive advantage of all-in-one startups over vertical startups (in customer support especially): "When we build corporate cards, we're not innovating on the way we issue corporate cards (through Stripe issuing or Marqeta) or the way we scan and extract metadata from receipts (which is mostly a vendor relationship for us today). We're going to win on the capabilities we have that are common to all Rippling products—the integration with the rest of Rippling and with employee data, the platform capabilities, and the common UX described above." Here's the full doc: https://lnkd.in/gYH59HVZ

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At last week’s ClimateTech Coffee 🚲 Bryan White and I were joined by Kimberly Gilbert, PhD to hear about her work on Carbon Neutralization and Ocean Storage (CNOS) through her company pHathom. Here’s a recap: The ocean naturally absorbs CO2 over time, but we’ve added so much that the ocean has become increasingly acidic. Ocean pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 globally over the last hundred years, and as pH drops it becomes harder for coral-based organisms to form shells. To combat this, Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) is an intervention that both reverses ocean acidification and removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Challenges with traditional OAE: - When you add the alkalinity into the ocean, it spreads out. It’s hard to measure the change in pH. - You don’t know exactly when the extra CO2 will be absorbed. Modeling and measurement companies are trying to help with this problem. Advantages of CNOS: - Co2 is captured directly at a coastal power plant or refinery, and then the concentrated Co2 is pumped into water that has limestone (and/or other alkaline materials) in it.  - This means the Co2 is dissolved onsite and the pH can be equilibrated onsite, which makes accurate measurement more feasible. Factors that affect progress:  - We’ll start seeing more companies enter in this space as the chemistry and its impacts are better understood and seen as safe  - Local and national permitting are a huge bottleneck - On the international permitting level, the London Protocol has a blanket ban on ocean geoengineering for anything except for research. There were good reasons for doing that, but it’s unclear who decides when that can change and the circumstances under which the ban is lifted. (Note: pHathom is not doing geoengineering; it’s doing water treatment on-site and releasing it back as ocean water) Open questions for the category/technology: - Can they come up with enough low-cost alkalinity sources, and get them in a way that doesn’t cause additional environmental damage or Co2 emissions?  - This approach will require pumping a lot of water. How much will that cost and how can the cost be driven down?  - Putting 100 plants’ worth of bicarbonate into the ocean is likely fine for ocean health relative to the climate benefit, but what is the point where the tradeoffs cross over? Some groups doing good work in this space:  [C]Worthy Carbon to Sea Initiative  University Research: UC Santa Barbara, University of Tasmania, GEOMAR, Dalhousie University, Scripps Join us for the next one in May! Details coming soon, and you can get updates by subscribing to the series page here: https://lnkd.in/g7DTGm2V

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Interesting read! Some of the biggest differentiators you can have as a saas b2b business are “humans providing hands-on account management, 24/7 technical CX, etc)”

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🚨 Bookkeeping is HARD - a Lesson from Synapse's Collapse 🚨 I was recently quoted in Mary Ann Azevedo's TechCrunch article on the bankruptcy of Synapse, a banking-as-a-service startup. As someone who works at a CPA firm that does bookkeeping for clients, the Synapse situation really resonated with me. Synapse had essentially one job - to sit between fintech startups and banks, and keep track of where each end-customer's funds went. Sounds simple, right? WRONG. Bookkeeping, especially in the highly-regulated world of finance, is incredibly complex. When Silicon Valley tries to "move fast and break things" in fintech without truly understanding the accounting complexities, people can actually get hurt. Supposedly, Synapse's collapse has impacted up to 10 MILLION consumers who now can't access their money. 😱 That's a lot of ordinary people who are going to have problems paying their rent or getting groceries. I'm seeing a similar wave of unkept promises hitting the small business accounting space. Startups saying that they can "automate" complex accounting tasks, but not really understanding what they actually need to do. And not taking into account how their mistakes will impact their small business customers. The last time this happened there were a lot of business owners who ended up losing a lot of their hard-earned cash when their supposed expert accountants messed up or dropped the ball. 😞 I'm sure that will happen again, and it bums me out. I'm all for moving fast and breaking things, but not if it hurts other people. https://lnkd.in/g6p_5viM?

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Thanks to Kanhai Kapadia for hosting me on the Hindsight podcast. It was a lot of fun talking about the importance of data in helping brands manage profitability and also how both Consumer Brands and SaaS companies are transitioning to this post-zirp environment #dtc #analytics

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8 years ago I went bankrupt while my second kid was born. Lost a $1/2M payout with no questions asked. Fast forward to today, I’ve: - Generated $50M+ in Ecomm - Built a dream team - Building $100M online store Here’s my story: Warning: You won’t see here any get-rich-quick schemes or easy ways out. This took me - 7 years of hard work - 8+ failed businesses - 2 times going bankrupt Alright… Now that all the lazy people have left we can jump straight in. 8 years ago, Before Ecom I was in Logistic Business. I was making millions. Life was good. I had: - Trucks - Drivers - 40-50 employees But then one day, it happened… A client didn’t pay me $1/2M. My Income from the last 2 years went down the toilet. There I was with two kids and a wife, thinking - “How am I going to feed them?”. It seemed like there was no way out. But I couldn’t just give up. So I did the opposite. I started looking for the answers. At one point I had 5 businesses open at the same time. I was hungry. Moreover, I had mouths to feed. I kept searching and looking and once again searching for the best way to make money. After 8+ failed businesses, I found my first success. E-Commerce. Therefore I started an agency, to help people FOR REAL. That’s where we are right now - Building stores ourselves - Helping people to do the same That’s why we started the public journey of building the $100M online store. and… That’s also the reason for our latest success in making $500k in 2 months. The best part? It’s just the beginning and you haven’t missed anything yet. The juiciest lessons and insights on: - Sales - Logistics - Building online stores Are about to come. So… Take your pen and paper and be ready to learn from from out past and present mistakes. Because Scaling an e-commerce store is hard. There are 100s of things that you need to manage. Such as: - Finding Winning Ads - Navigate the Sales Rollercoaster - Conversation Rate Optimization And more. It’s a lot for one person. I’ve been there & done that. Trust me – I get it. Not to mention the Shopify and PayPal problems. I struggled to: - Find winning ads - Scale past 6,7-figures - Build trustable team The struggle is real. But despite all of this, I managed to get off my ass, master the game and scale my operation to 8 figures. All in just under 8 years. If a broke father of two can learn how to do this – so can you. And I’m going to show you how. That’s why I created a Telegram group. To share lessons, stories, and insights from my 8 years in the most lucrative industry in the world: E-commerce. So… If you want to: - Discover EXACTLY how to grow a $100M online store And YES… - Get rich building Brands THIS year Then my Telegram group. That’s my story. I hope you now feel like you know me a little bit more. See you inside, - Gustavs P.S. I’m hosting a LIVE today at 3pm (EEST), feel free to join and ask questions. https://lnkd.in/dvEer6Fk

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How does David beat Goliath aka early-stage startups close candidates also interviewing at FAANG / larger companies? Generally, they don’t, but here’s what @SingleSprout's data (80% offer close rate in last 6 months) says: 1) $30k: If the offer from a big company exceeds yours by over $30k, you're very likely not going to get that candidate. 2) # of Competitors: A candidate considering one large company might still be within reach. However, the more large companies they entertain, the less likely you'll get them. 3) Motivation: Understanding why a candidate genuinely prefers your company is crucial. Look for and test for interest in impact, equity, and the entrepreneurial journey. Unfortunately, most startups hiring on their own can't get this level of information from a candidate, and sadly waste a lot of precious time :(

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Yesterday we launched the next chapter of Pocus to help companies run ALL go-to-market playbooks, powered by AI. After 3 years building with the best leaders in GTM, this launch is a realization of our founding vision to unlock data for GTM teams. Isaac Pohl-Zaretsky and I built Pocus because we saw that go-to-market teams were desperate for accurate & actionable data. We started with PLG companies, who felt this pain acutely with product usage data. As we dug in deeper we realized there was an entirely new GTM motion — Product-Led Sales — that companies needed help building. With our customers and community, we built PLS from a niche strategy to a standard GTM motion. It has been incredible. This next chapter is a natural extension of what we’ve built in Product-Led Sales. In this next chapter of Pocus, we unlock ALL data (not just product usage), to power ALL go-to-market playbooks (not just PLS). We help customers turn all data into revenue, powered by AI. We’ll do this with 3 key product investments 1/ Enrich: unify customer identity across various data sources 2/ Engage: helps sellers reach out to the right users with the right message at the right time 2/ Optimize: help leaders copy & paste their best reps’ workflows Check out the blog Isaac wrote highlighting new features launching today and what’s coming soon (hint - it’s a LOT). We’re also co-hosting a webinar in a few weeks to talk through the state of the market, the trends we’re seeing, and how Pocus will help our customers continue to thrive.  RSVP at the link below.

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The journey from $1 to $10M in ARR is typically an exercise in finding your first channel-market fit as a GTM/Marketing leader and/or founder. After prioritizing the top 1-3 channels you believe are most likely to be a fit for your product, finding channel-market fit is typically an exercise in experiments and iterations. If you’re flying blind bc you don’t have the systems, processes, and data hygiene setup to measure and test quickly inside a framework, it’s going to be a difficult journey. Check out the podcast I did with the team at Evron for more mistakes to avoid on your journey from $1M to $10M ARR.

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*Shopify BEATS on Q1 earnings* - I listened to Harley Finkelstein at 2x speed so you don't have to.. Highlights below 👇 In Q1, Shopify beat on both revenue and earnings with increased payment adoption and rapid growth as well as continued wins in the enterprise segment. Notable wins included BARKBOX, INC. PrettyLitter, Overstock, WYN BEAUTY by Serena Williams. A quick rundown of the #'s Gross Merchandise Value: $60.9B ( ⬆ 23%) - same growth rate as Q4. impressive to see that growth rate sustained at increasing scale. Revenue: $1.9B (⬆ 23%) - up 29% when adjusting for the sale of Shopify Fulfillment Network to Flexport. Gross Payments Volume: $36.2B (⬆ 32%) - most importantly GPV grew to 60% of GMV up from 56% in 2023 which means they're capturing more share of payments via Shopify Payments which means more revenue. Looking closely, their take rate also is increasing as Shop Pay increases penetration Subscription Solutions Revenue: $511M (⬆ 34%) - mainly driven by price increases and increased merchant adoption. MRR: $151M (⬆ 32%) - interesting 🚩 this is only up $2M from Q4 2023, so QoQ MRR growth is actually a tepid < 2% Shopify Plus accounts for 32% of MRR, a decline in share from Q3 last year. This is one of those hard-to-reconcile counter-narratives to everything the team says on these earnings calls about enterprise and moving up market. Gross Profit: $957M with GM at 51.4%. It's interesting to watch this GM oscillate on revenue mix for the quarter. Q4 is payments heavy which is traditionally lower margin whereas more of the revenue in Q1 comes from SaaS and subscriptions and pushes margin up. GP is what pays the bills so great to see it growing so quickly Free Cashflow: $232M (12% FCF margin and doubling YoY) - Shopify continues to become a cash-generating machine that will allow it to reinvest in its platform and growth to up the pressure on incumbents like Salesforce and Adobe. THE MAGIC METRIC - Shopify talks about increasing the Attach Rate, but I don't think they spend enough time on it. Ultimately, it's the number that drives this business and the long-term shareholder value of the company. Attach rate is defined as (merchant revenue/merchant GMV). Effectively, it's how much of their customers' revenue they capture as revenue to the platform. However, it's the ultimate balancing act - if too high competitors can steal share, too low, the business doesn't grow. The way to continue to justify increasing this take rate is to build valuable net new features where merchants have no problem paying incremental dollars to Shopify because they're either adding more value to the business or replacing other costs in the PnL. This is why Shopify Editions is such a big thing! Currently, Attach Rate is at 2.99% and growing QoQ The Look Ahead to Q1 2024 Looking forward, Q2 is forecasted to be in line with expectations set at the end of last year, so no surprises there. Good quarter Shopify!! #shopify

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InVision has experienced the biggest fall from glory in Silicon Valley's recent history. $350M raised with a peak valuation of $2B. And now they are shutting down. Not acquihired or "acquired by private equity" or strategic tuck-in. Just a hard stop. It's so easy to s**t on them. They got out-innovated, they were not product driven etc. etc. But, the truth is most startups that raised monster rounds in ZIRP days could face this deadend. You raised too much money: 1/ So you are too expensive to acquire 2/ So you raised your burn too high to finance a big GTM team 2/ So you got complacent on product 3/ So you got lazy on shipping There will be a lot more inVisions in the next 24 months as startups run out of capital. It's sad. The employees & founders at these companies gave it their all, but raising too much money sealed their fate. For the next gen of startup founders, heed this advice: raise little, keep your burn low, ship fast!

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The #1 question I get asked is: “How do I hire a CEO?” (How to hire, incentivize, and manage a CEO) I created a guide with all my learnings from hiring ~40+ CEOs and leaders across Tiny (and many epic fuck ups along the way). Topics I cover include: Is hiring a CEO the right choice for you? When to hire a CEO? How to find the right CEO? Should you invest in a recruiter? What to look for in your CEO? How to diligence candidates? How to ensure a culture fit? How to negotiate & structure compensation? How to transition from founder to owner? How to relinquish control? How to determine CEO success? When to replace the CEO? Book Recommendations * A cheatsheet is included with key points from all sections. Get my guide for free → https://bit.ly/4bSTeUY Enjoy!

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Most DTC founders second-guess their decisions because they don’t know how those decisions will impact their cash position. “If I double down on this campaign, will I be able to buy inventory next month?” “Can I afford to hire someone to help me with website design?” Very reasonable questions, but the answers are hard to find when you rely on spreadsheets and have 100 other things to do. Using Viable, founders can easily forecast cash flow and understand what investments they can make without risking the business. #cashflow #dtc #ecommerce

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